Mystery religion

Mystery religion, any of various secret cults of the Greco-Roman world that offered to individuals religious experiences not provided by the official public religions. They originated in tribal ceremonies that were performed by primitive peoples in many parts of the world. Whereas in these tribal communities almost every member of the clan or the village was initiated, initiation in Greece became a matter of personal choice. The mystery religions reached their peak of popularity in the first three centuries ad. Their origin, however, goes back to the earlier centuries of Greek history.

Etymologically, the word mystery is derived from the Greek verb myein (“to close”), referring to the lips and the eyes. Mysteries were always secret cults into which a person had to be “initiated” (taken in). The initiate was called mystēs, the introducing person mystagōgos (leader of the mystēs). The leaders of the cults included the hierophantēs (“revealer of holy things”) and the dadouchos (“torchbearer”). The constitutive features of a mystery society were common meals, dances, and ceremonies, especially initiation rites. These common experiences strengthened the bonds of each cult.

History

Hellenic roots

In every Greek city the god Dionysus was worshipped by fraternities and sororities and also by mixed communities. Dionysus was a god of fruitfulness and vegetation but especially of wine. The Dionysiac festivals provided an opportunity for stepping outside of the daily routine. The festivals included not only drinking wine and engaging in sexual activity but also participating in such significant features of Greek civilization as choral singing and mimes. In many cases, only the initiated could participate in the ceremonies. As almost every Greek did join in, initiation into the Dionysiac cult might be compared to tribal initiations. It seems that initiation into the Dionysiac Mysteries was accompanied by initiation into sexual life. The act of producing offspring, however, could never be wholly separated from the thought of death, so that the worshippers of Dionysus were aware of a mystic communion among the ancestors, the living generation, and the future members of the community.

The most important sanctuary of Demeter (Ceres), the goddess of grain, and her daughter Kore (Persephone) was in the city of Eleusis in Attica, between Athens and Megara. Famous religious agricultural festivals—known as the Greater and the Lesser Eleusinian Mysteries—celebrating the sowing, sprouting, and reaping of the grain, were reenacted in this city. The cycle of the grain, pictured in the myth of Kore (Persephone), was thought to be parallel to the cycle of man. The myth, as told in the Homeric hymn to Demeter, tells how Hades (Pluto, or Pluton), god of the netherworld, wanted a wife and how he carried off Kore into the depths of the earth. Her mother, Demeter, through long days of searching, during which she came to Eleusis, refused to make the grain grow. Finally, Hades was bidden to send Kore back to earth. She came back to light as the grain maiden and gave birth to her son Plutus (Kore, “the maiden”; Pluton, “the rich one”; Plutus, “wealth,” especially in grain). But, because Kore had eaten a pomegranate seed, a symbol of death and birth, she could not be completely released, and a compromise was reached by which she spent one-third of the year with her husband, the rest with her mother. Satisfied with this, Demeter caused grain to grow again and taught the Eleusinians her rites. The entire story of Demeter and Kore was elaborately reenacted in the Eleusinian ceremony. Just as in the myth Kore was carried away to marry Hades and to give birth to Plutus, so was grain thrown into the field and buried in the earth to bring forth new life. Just as grain came up out of the ground and was reaped to yield man’s bread and to be used as seed, so was a girl taken from her parents and her virginity “killed” to bring forth new offspring. And when a man died, he was buried in the earth to partake mystically in the cyclic renewal of life. This was the message of Eleusis: out of every grave new life grows—for the initiates there are “good hopes” for a glorious immortality in the afterlife.

Persephone being carried off to the underworld, terra-cotta plaque from the sanctuary of Persephone at Locri Epizephyrii, first half of the 5th century bc; in the Museo Nazionale di Taranto, ItalyLeonard Von Matt/Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Although there were festivals of Demeter throughout Greece, the true Eleusinian Mysteries were celebrated at Eleusis only. At first, the cult of Demeter was local and initiation was tribal rather than personal. By participating in the mysteries, a man became a full member of the civic body. This was changed when Eleusis was annexed to the Athenian territory about 600 bc. Initiation lost its importance as a means of conferring civic status; it became a purely religious ceremony. Every Athenian was admitted to the Eleusinian Mysteries, and soon the mysteries were open to every Greek, so that the ceremonies received an “international” character. Whoever wished to be initiated, however, had to go to Eleusis. It was a day’s journey from Athens, a longer distance from most of the other Greek cities. The mystery rite became no longer a tribal ceremony. Each person had to decide for himself whether or not he wanted to be initiated. This development was possible only because Athens had become a large city with a differentiatedculture that gave the individual ample choice of a way of life, including religion.

Both Dionysiac and Eleusinian mysteries had a wide range of meaning. Their essence was not contained in any written record but only in the festivals themselves—the holy days of the community. Many participants appreciated only the superficial level of the ceremonies and considered them as an opportunity for having a good time—good company, good food, intoxication, and sometimes (in the Dionysiac cult) sexual pleasures. The ceremonies were open to a deeper understanding, however, that was not made explicit by any theology or by any set of creeds but by the religious action itself, which contained the meaning and conveyed it to the participants without the interposition of words. Therefore, it was not possible to disclose to the noninitiated the mysteries by words, but it was treachery to reveal the secret dances.

A society of initiates could drop its religious connections and become merely a social club. But because secrecy, common meals, and common drinking were implied, the Greeks and Romans regarded such clubs as mystery societies; they did not differentiate between religious associations and private clubs. The role of aristocratic clubs in Athenian politics was very important. In 415 bc the famous mystery scandal occurred. Several aristocratic societies conspired to overthrow the Athenian democracy. In order to pledge all members, a common crime was committed in which each member had to participate. One night the members of the social clubs took hammers and removed the genitals of the many Hermes statues in the city. Whoever would desert the common political cause would be denounced by his former friends for having committed a crime against religion, and many witnesses against him would be at hand. The people of Athens immediately understood that a conspiracy was developing. By a series of severe trials, the conspirators were traced and exiled. The speech of the orator Andocides, one of the conspirators, delivered in his defense in 400 or 399 bc, when the old affair was again taken up in a trial, still survives. The title of the oration is “On the Mysteries.”

The secular mystery clubs continued throughout Greek and Roman history, and it was often difficult to distinguish them from religious associations. The Romans were especially distrustful of secret societies. This suspicion was justified in the case of Catiline, who led a conspiracy that attempted to overthrow the government in 63 bc. But Trajan, the Roman emperor from ad 98 to 117, did not allow the citizens of Nicomedia (modern İzmit, Turkey) to form a club that planned to provide a fire brigade, and he only reluctantly allowed the citizens of Amisus (modern Samsun, Turkey) to establish an association for charitable purposes.

Besides community initiations, there were ceremonies for individual persons of deeper religious longing. Such persons were called Orphics after Orpheus, the Greek hero with superhuman musical skills who was supposedly the author of sacred writings; these writings were called the Orphic rhapsodies and they dealt with such subjects as purification and the afterlife. It is possible to reconstruct a common pattern for these initiations of individuals, although an Orphic “church” never existed, and the doctrines of the many small communities of individualists varied on a broad scale.

Many Orphics seem to have had a strong feeling of sin and guilt. They believed that there was a divine part in man—his soul—but it was wrapped up in the body, and man’s task was to liberate the soul from the body. This could be achieved by living an Orphic life, which included abstinence from meat, wine, and sexual intercourse. After death the soul would be judged. If a man had lived a righteous life, his soul would be sent to the meadows of the blessed in Elysium; but, if he had committed misdeeds, his soul would be punished in various ways and perhaps sent to hell. Following a period of reward or punishment, the soul would be incarnated in a new body. Only a soul that had lived a pious life three times could be liberated from the cycle.

The Orphic creeds were the basis of the Pythagorean brotherhood, which flourished in southern Italy beginning in the 6th century bc. The Pythagoreans were aristocratic fraternities that sometimes had a political scope. Their main achievements, however, lay in the fields of music, geometry, and astronomy. They discovered that these subjects could be explained by numbers and ratios. Combining Orphic eschatology (the study of the last things, especially death and afterlife) with their discoveries, they invested music, geometry, and astronomy with religious values. According to their doctrine, the original home of the soul was in the stars. From there it fell down to earth and associated with the body. Thus, man was a stranger on the earth, and he had to strive to liberate himself from the ties of the flesh and return to the soul’s celestial home.

The philosophy of Plato (c. 428–348 or 347 bc) by no means resulted from connections with a mystery cult. Yet Plato did take up many ideas from earlier Greek religion, especially from the Pythagorean brotherhood and from the Eleusinian communities, and often described his philosophy in terms derived from the mysteries. For example, the notion of searching and finding, so important in Eleusis, became an important notion in Plato’s philosophy: the philosopher should never cease or relax in his quest for truth. A value was thus attached to the very act of searching. Later mystery religions, in their turn, borrowed freely from the rich imagery of Plato’s dialogues and are thus deeply tinged with Platonism.

In the Timaeus, which is an exposition of his theory of the universe, Plato also developed his theory of the soul. The earth is surrounded by the spheres of the seven planets; the eighth sphere is that of the fixed stars. Beyond the eighth sphere is the realm of the divine. The sphere of the fixed stars, moved by the divine, continuously turns to the right at an even speed. This clockwise rotation affects the spheres of the planets, although they have their proper movement, which runs to the left, or counterclockwise. The sphere of mortality begins with the planets. The original home of each soul is in one of the fixed stars. As a result of the movement of the spheres, the soul falls through the planetary spheres to earth, where it is united with the body. The soul must then try to liberate itself from the body and ascend to the fixed star from which it fell. In later generations this picture was vividly worked out. The soul, in the course of its fall through the planetary spheres, was thought to acquire the qualities of the planets: sloth from Saturn, combativeness from Mars, lust for power from Jupiter, voluptuousness from Venus, greed from Mercury. After death, when the soul returned to the fixed star, it discarded these qualities, just as the mystēs, in certain initiations, discarded his everyday garment before entering the sacred place.

Many other traditional religious images were taken over by Plato, including the music of the spheres, the migration of the soul, the soul’s remembrance of its celestial origin, and the idea of rewards for the righteous and punishment for the wicked. Later mystery associations adopted these concepts, which Plato had expressed so beautifully, and were deeply influenced by Plato’s explanations.

The Hellenistic period

When Alexander the Great conquered the Asiatic kingdoms as far east as the Indus River, the Greek world was extended immensely. The religious ideas in Greece itself and the western part of the Alexandrian Empire, however, changed very slowly, because the Greeks, now masters of the world, felt no need for change.

In the Messenian town of Andania mysteries were celebrated in honour of the goddesses Demeter and Kore. A long inscription of 92 bc gives elaborate directions for the conduct of the rites, although, naturally, it gives no details of what went on during initiation. The mysteries in honour of the Cabeiri (gods of fertility) on the island of Samothrace attracted great attention in this period. These gods were thought to be helpers of the seafarers, and initiation into their mysteries was looked upon as a general safeguard against all misfortune but particularly against shipwreck. The Dionysiac Mysteries, with their revels and merriment, continued throughout the whole of Greek history. Together with most of the elements of Greek civilization, this cult was transferred to Italy. In 186 bc a scandal about the Bacchanalia—the Latin name for the Hellenistic Dionysiac Mysteries—so upset the Romans that a decree of the Senate prohibited them throughout Italy, except in certain special cases. These mysteries were celebrated in a lower middle class milieu and involved gross sex parties and violence conducted under the cover of mystery secrecy.

The important developments in the mystery rites during the Hellenistic period took place in the Greek Orient, where elements from the Greek and Oriental religions were blended. Contact with Greek civilization completely changed life in the Orient, where the knowledge of writing had been confined to a few priests and scribes. Society first disintegrated after the conquest of Alexander and then developed along new lines. Changes in religion were inevitable, and some influence of Oriental traditions upon the Greeks was bound to follow. But the process was a slow one and became manifest only a few centuries later.

With regard to the institution of kingship, however, syncretism worked quickly. Ancient Near Eastern kingship was originally sacral. The Syrian and Egyptian inhabitants of the newly created Greek kingdoms inevitably regarded the Greco-Macedonian kings as semidivine beings. The Greeks themselves soon submitted to this mixture of politics and religion. Such a mixture was perfectly natural to the Egyptians and Syrians, who did not perceive the structure of society as an abstraction, such as “the state” or “the nation,” but saw the unity of the body politic in the person of the king. He was the symbol of the security and help that man derives from an orderly society. Mystery rituals, called royal mysteries, were developed especially in Egypt. According to traditional Egyptian religion, the ruling pharaoh was an incarnation of Horus (the sun-god), his mother or wife an incarnation of Isis (the heavenly queen), and his deceased father an incarnation of Osiris (the god of fertility). In Hellenistic times, Osiris was commonly known by the name Serapis. These gods became equated with Greek gods: Isis with Demeter and Aphrodite; Horus with Apollo and Helios; Serapis with Zeus, Dionysus, and Hades (Pluto). Both Greek and Egyptian myths were adopted for these divinities.

Khafre, detail of a statue with the god Horus in the shape of a falcon; in the Egyptian Museum, CairoCourtesy of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo; photograph, Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich

One of the suburbs of Alexandria, the newly constructed Greek capital of Egypt, was called Eleusis after the city of Demeter in Greece, and the Eleusinian Mysteries were instituted in a Greco-Egyptian adaptation. Dionysiac Mysteries were introduced on an even greater scale, so that the royal court was temporarily thrown into turmoil by the number of Bacchic ceremonies in which the king was considered to be a reincarnation of Dionysus. The Pythagorean concept of the migration of the soul was also taken over and was blended with the Egyptian belief in the reincarnation of the sun-god Horus in the reigning king.

The cult of rulers thus introduced ideas from the Greek Orient into Greek communities. But the mixture of religion and politics was a great obstacle for the propagation of the Greco-Oriental mysteries in the Mediterranean world. Even the numerous Greeks who lived in Egypt and Syria maintained the traditional Greek concept of the separation of god and man, and it was only after the political aspect of the mysteries was discarded that the religious elements could gain a life of their own. Inscriptions discovered on the Greek island of Delos demonstrate this well. The worship of Serapis was introduced at Delos during the time the island was temporarily a naval base of the Greco-Egyptian kings. When the Egyptian influence on the island receded, the cult of Serapis not only remained but reached new heights. The Romans later used Delos as a free port for the eastern part of the Mediterranean, and from there the worship of Serapis and Isis spread to most of the harbours of the Greek world and to the cities in the Bay of Naples, whence it was brought by Italian merchants to Rome.

The combination of mystery elements with ruler worship is also evident in the kingdom of Commagene (eastern Turkey and northern Syria). Here, the kings assigned large funds to construct throughout the country gigantic sanctuaries, where festivals of the gods and the royal ancestors were celebrated annually on the kings’ anniversary days. Long inscriptions discovered in the remains of these sanctuaries bear striking similarities to the language of the mysteries. The ceremonies, however, seem to have contained little true religion.

Roman imperial times

The great period of the mystery religions began when the Romans imposed peace upon the Mediterranean world. The Dionysiac, or Bacchic, societies flourished in the whole empire—in Greece proper, on the Greek islands, in Asia Minor, along the Danube River, and especially in Italy and at Rome. Hundreds of inscriptions attest to Bacchic Mysteries. In some circles, Orphic and Dionysiac ideas were blended, as in the community that met in the underground basilica near the Porta Maggiore (Major Gate) at Rome. There was also a blend of ideas in the community for which the Orphic hymns were written. The members of this community (probably in Asia Minor) assembled at night in a clubhouse and held their services by the light of torches. Their rite consisted of a bloodless sacrifice and included the use of incense, prayer, and hymns. In addition to the mystery cults that were familiar from earlier times, the national religions of the peoples of the Greek Orient in their Hellenized versions began to spread. A faintly exotic flavour surrounded these religions and made them particularly attractive to the Greeks and Romans. The most popular of the Oriental mysteries was the cult of Isis. It was already in vogue at Rome in the time of the emperor Augustus, at the beginning of the Christian era. The Emperor, who wanted to restore the genuine Roman religious traditions, disliked the Oriental influences. But men of reputation, such as Messalla, a general and patron of writers, were strongly inclined toward the Isis Mysteries. Isis, the goddess of love, was the patroness of many of the elegant Roman courtesans. The religion of Isis became widespread in Italy during the 1st and 2nd centuries ad. To a certain extent, the expansion of Judaism and Christianity over the Roman world coincided with the expansion of the Egyptian cults.

Far less important was the influence of cults from Asia Minor. By 200 bc the Great Mother of the Gods (Magna Mater) and her consort Attis were introduced into the Roman pantheon and were considered as Roman gods. Their cult seems to have been encouraged especially under Emperor Claudius about ad 50. The Great Mother was characterized by her universal motherhood, especially over wild nature. The mysteries symbolized, through her relationship to Attis, the relations of Mother Earth to her children and were intended to impress upon the mystēs the subjective certainty of having been united in a special way with the goddess. There was a strong element of hope for an afterlife in this cult. The Persian god Mithra (Mithras), the god of light, was introduced much later, probably not before the 2nd century. The cult of Mithra was concerned with the origin of life from a sacred bull that was caught and then sacrificed by Mithra. According to Persian sources, the bull by its death gave birth to the sky, the planets, the earth, the animals, and the plants; thus Mithra became the creator of life. From Syria came the worship of several deities, of which Jupiter Heliopolitanus (the local god of Heliopolis; modern Baʿlabakk, Lebanon) and Jupiter Dolichenus (the local god of Doliche in Commagene; modern Dülük, Turkey) were the most important. Adonis (a god of vegetation) of Byblos (in modern Lebanon) had long been familiar to the Greeks and was often considered to be closely related to Osiris; the myths and rituals of the two gods were similar. Adonis’ female partner was Atargatis (Astarte), whom the Greeks identified with Aphrodite. At the time of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, in the latter half of the 2nd century ad, a pseudo-prophet named Alexander the Paphlagonian devised a great mystery spectacle centred around a holy snake called Glycon and had great success during his lifetime.

The height of Syrian influence was in the 3rd century ad when Sol, the Syrian sun god, was on the verge of becoming the chief god of the Roman Empire. He was introduced into Rome by the emperor Elagabalus (Heliogabalus) in about ad 220, and by about ad 240 Pythian Games (i.e., festivals of the sun god Apollo Helios) were instituted in many cities of the empire. The emperor Aurelian (270–275) elevated Sol to the highest rank among the gods. Sanctuaries of Sol and the gods of other planets (septizonium) were constructed. Even the emperor Constantine the Great, some 50 years later, wavered between Sol and Christ. For some time his religious policy was devised so as to allow the coexistence of both religions. Finally, Christianity was accepted as the official religion.

The different mystery religions were not exclusive of one another, but they appealed to different sociological groups. The middle class of the Greek and Roman cities preferred the Dionysiac societies, the festivals of which were a cult of beauty and merriment. Isis was worshipped by lower middle class people in the seaports and trading towns. The followers of the Great Mother in Italy were principally craftsmen. Mithra was the god of soldiers and of imperial officials and freedmen. There were no special societies for slaves; but they were usually admitted to the societies, and, during the time of the festival, all men were considered equal.

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